Call centers, also commonly referred to as contact centers, distribute calls and other types of communications to available service agents in accordance with various criteria. A problem that arises in such call centers involves the presentation of complex, detailed historical data related to call center processes. Call center managers need to understand the activities and states of many different entities, including agents, calls, queues, trunks, and the like, from many perspectives. For example, a call center manager might want to understand why calls are being placed on hold for long periods of time, how agents are spending their time, what agent behavior led to a particular customer complaint, etc.
A typical conventional approach is to present detailed information in the form of lengthy, plain tabular detail reports. By detailed information, we mean information about specific events, such as calls, transactions, etc. This is in contrast to summary information like counts of calls handled by agents. A call center manager can be overwhelmed with the number of items returned by current detail reports. For example, a given detail report may be in the form of a tabular listing of every call processing action taken for every call handled by a particular agent. The detailed information may be extracted by a call center reporting system, loaded into a database, and then used to generate a tabular detail report. However, understanding the information in such a tabular detail report can be unduly time-consuming and may not help the manager recognize inappropriate agent behavior and other problems.
It is therefore apparent that a need exists for improved techniques for presenting call center process information, so as to overcome the drawbacks associated with the above-described tabular detail reports. More specifically, what is needed is a concise and intuitive visual presentation of call center process information through new graphical visualization techniques that are compatible with and delivered through a reporting platform.